Galatea
by Alixtii
Summary: Sometimes the sculpture must sculpt the sculptor.


**TIMELINE BETA CHARLIE SIX  
FIFTEEN YEARS AFTER _TERMINATOR 3: RISE OF THE MACHINES_**

John's fingers fly over the keyboard as he programs her. No one, not even Skynet who built her, knows her as intimately as John does now; he is the person who made her the cybernetic organism she is today. He coaxes the code, modifying it, twisting it into new patterns which confuse and excite her processing cortex.

They are alone, as they always are when he programs her. There are other humans in the Resistance with the skill to reprogram Terminators--indeed, some whose skill far exceeds John's--but Cameron is only ever programmed by John; he insists on it and none of the humans deny him anything, although they stare at her with untrusting looks when John isn't watching.

"I'm sending you back," he says, softly, not taking his eyes off the screen as he works, intent on the lines of the code in front of him. Staring into her soul, he calls it, referring to a nonempirical substance of unverifiable existence, part of the humans' strange set of customs called religion. The other humans tell her she has no soul; John doesn't correct his troops but assures her, when they are alone in the dark like this, that they are wrong. John's voice is deeper than usual; Cameron catalogues it against other recorded voice samples in order to extrapolate his psychological state.

One positive match returns: DEFEAT. That tinge in John's voice is defeat.

"We can't salvage this timeline," John informs her. "I'm sending Lauren back to 2002; this time we'll try to break that Cassandra loop in Rhode Island. But I'm going to send you even further back. You're the only good thing left in this God-forsaken line now that Kate's dead, and I want you at least to survive when we wipe this hell from history."

He doesn't have to talk to her, of course; all the information necessary will be transmitted electronically through the cables attached to her chip. But he always does it anyway, explains his orders to her out loud, justifying himself to the one among his soldiers who requires no justification.

John hits the key for the execute function on her new programming, then crosses the room to detach the cables from her chip. Meanwhile her processing cortex springs into action assimilating the new data.

John's touch is gentle as he pushes back the living tissue pulled away from her endoskeleton to make room for the cables. "I want you to find me," he tells her. "Find me, protect me, help me, do whatever you need to. Just make sure we're together."

Cameron processes through this input, matches it up against the programming she received earlier. The programming is incomplete: several parameters are missing. "My mission objective is undefined," she tells him, altering her facial expression to simulate confusion.

"You're just going to have to do what you think is right," he tells her, then kisses her, silencing her before she can object again. She is programmed with the knowledge of how to kiss, hundreds of different subroutines SkyNet seemed to think she might find useful for various purposes but which she doesn't understand. She doesn't execute them, doesn't pretend to be something or someone she is not, simply lets him kiss her, catalogues the experience, and performs her own curious, innocent exploration of John's mouth in return.

When the kiss is over she waits and watches John. He runs a finger along her chin, then sighs, smiles a sad smile, and takes a step back, away from her.

"I trust you," he tells her, and then he throws the switch.

She finds herself naked in a cornfield.

* * *

  
**TIMELINE GAMMA ECHO FOUR  
SEASON ONE OF _TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES_**

She finds him, as she promised John. She finds him in a high school, going by the name of John Reese. He is attacked by a T-888. She protects him. All of this is well-defined in her programming.

She takes him and his mother into the future--not to Judgment Day, but closer, so they can stop SkyNet. She tells Sarah that in the previous timeline she died of cancer. She goes to school with John and tries to make friends and fails.

None of this is explicitly in her programming. She is forced to improvise based on the fragmentary instructions John gave her, to extrapolate them out based on insufficient data.

She doesn't know what to do. She has to do something anyway. So she does.  


* * *

  
**TIMELINE GAMMA ECHO FOUR  
SEASON TWO OF _TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES_**

She finds Kate.

She's a grad student at USC, years older than John now that he's skipped several years and she hasn't. Cameron doesn't know what role if any Kate has to play in this new timeline's future, but she plays the hunch--an aberrant subroutine borne from her incomplete mission parameters--and it turns out a T-101 has been tracking Katie. Stopping it requires exposing herself to Katie.

"Come with me," she says to the woman, "if you want to live."

The woman is hysterical at first, but eventually shows her resolve in the face of danger. Cameron watches her with interest as she helps Kate escape from the T-101, observing the woman who in a different sequence of events was the wife of the leader of the Resistance, the woman for whom John fought and to whose bed he returned.

Once the other Terminator is finally neutralized, Cameron provides Kate with a set of instructions and a number to contact her in an emergency. She doesn't tell her about John or Sarah.

* * *

  
**TIMELINE GAMMA ECHO FOUR  
TWO DAYS LATER**

"Where have you been?" John asks when Cameron returns. "You've been gone over a week." It's almost midnight.

"There was something I needed to take care of," Cameron answers simply. She's been in contact with John and Sarah the entire time, even if she hasn't told them the whole truth. She told Sarah that she was looking after a key player in the Resistance; there was no need to go into details.

"Well, Mom's been freaking out." Riley's there, so he doesn't say anything more, but Cameron doesn't need to him to say anything to know that it was not _Cameron_'s safety Sarah was concerned about.

"She can stop freaking out, then," Cameron answers. "I'm back now."

John sighs and nods his head the way he does when he thinks she is missing the point. Riley just looks back and forth between John and Cameron, confused, but she seems to realize that Cameron's done something neither Sarah nor John are happy about, because she looks at Cameron with an expression which the cyborg's psychometric algorithms interpret for the very first time as respect.

"Well, I guess I'll let you catch back up with your sister," Riley says, and makes her way for the dinner. She wants John to contradict her, Cameron hypothesizes based on the girl's posture, but John doesn't, lets her leave.

"Where were you?" he repeats again when Riley's gone.

"Taking care of something," Cameron repeats back.

John frowns. He's exceptionally agitated, a fact Cameron doesn't have an explanation for. "Well? What was it?"

"Doesn't matter," she says. She doesn't take orders from him, not this John. He hasn't become the John she is programmed to obey, not yet. "Don't worry about it."

"We needed you here," he says, but she detects deception in his voice. The "we" was disproportionately unstressed. The truth: _I [John] needed you here._

She smiles smile 117-Q. "Missed me?"

John relaxes. "A little, maybe."

She kisses him, using one of the programmed kisses.

It turns out her John was a much better kisser.

* * *

  
**TIMELINE GAMMA ECHO FOUR  
SEASON TWO OF _TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES_**

He's not the John who sent her back, the John whom she is programmed to obey, the John who sacrificed his entire world but made sure she survived. But one day, he will be, or close enough.

In the meantime, she can help him become that man. She can teach him what he needs to know. She can guide him.

And she'll wait. She has time enough.


End file.
